The constitutional lawyer Adrian Simons spoke with Peru21TV on the initiative that would classify extortion and organized crime as urban terrorism and that will be debated in the Plenary Session of Congress next Thursday.
What do you think of the initiative to classify extortion and hitmen as urban terrorism?
Any crime can be classified as urban terrorism, the problem is whether a law will solve national security. We believe that this is the country of Harry Potter where the laws are magic wands that, by their mere enactment, will begin to change a reality as harsh as the one we have. These 17 bills do nothing to help a comprehensive plan against organized crime. What our country needs is political and logistical management in the face of this scourge that is threatening us, which is organized crime.
Congress was widely criticized when they changed the organized crime law. Do you think it should be modified to drastically punish criminals?
What we need is for the prosecutors to do their job, we need judges to hand down sentences promptly, for the system to start working and if something is going wrong, then change it. They use the issue of the classification of organized crime as a populist pretext to make us believe that this law will work much better and that is not the case. What we need is a comprehensive management proposal, involving the private sector. We are paying for a political crisis, we have had I don’t know how many ministers, I don’t know how many police chiefs, there is no national security policy.
Do you think that the president and the Minister of the Interior are willing to listen? Because they only blame the press…
The only thing the press does is reflect every day what happens in reality, making visible those people who are defenseless and without any protection from the State. The Executive Branch is radically wrong, the problem is the lack of a comprehensive policy, there is no working table. If we do not articulate an efficient, effective comprehensive strategy that makes us all participate without excluding the private sector, we will continue as we continue.
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